1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a system and method for problem determination in an information technology (IT) system or environment, and more particularly, to a system and method for generating and utilizing a multi-dimensional problem signature for problem determination in an IT system or environment.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Problems tend to become increasingly complex in information technology (IT) systems and environments over time. A problem may exhibit a number of symptoms across distributed computer systems and applications. The symptoms may be identified in a number of ways such as, for example, analyzing error messages and application logs and monitoring system events and system vitals series. The symptoms may also exhibit certain spatial and temporal relationships in relation to each other.
In addition to identifying and analyzing symptoms of a problem, a problem may also be identified and characterized based on system configurations, software versions, and the type of systems and platforms in the IT environment.
Problems are typically characterized manually by the user. For example, a user may record a non-structured textual description of the symptoms of a problem in a problem ticket. Thus, symptoms and system data may not be collected and included in the problem description. This results in incomplete information and decreased ability to reuse the problem resolution for problem determination of future tickets relating to the IT environment. Further, characterizing problems manually results in the inability to characterize complex problems, since manual characterization does not allow for the extraction and consolidation of various perspectives and related contexts into a problem signature. For example, manually characterizing problems may not account for useful, non-textual information such as system vitals information represented as plot images or matrices. In addition, searching problem repositories is typically keyword based, which is often ineffective and cumbersome when searching problems having complex characteristics.